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On one hand, there’s pop star Lana Del Rey posing naked on the cover of GQ, dance diva Rihanna kissing Chris Brown — the man who beat her up — at the MTV Video Music Awards, and lap-dancing, bong-whiffing former tween star Miley Cyrus leapfrogging from one tabloid-stoked scandal to the next.

On the other hand (actually, it’s the same hand), there’s Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes in a cat fight over drunk driving charges; Madonna mocking her former protégé, Lady Gaga, for ripping off her songs; Jennifer Love Hewitt trading sexual favours for tips as a perky masseuse on TV’s The Client List and Elizabeth Hurley marketing a line of bikinis for preteen girls.

Is this the logical result of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which fought for women to enjoy the same personal freedoms men had long taken for granted? Or is it a cultural hiccup, a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction?

Beats me. What I do know is:

• The Girls Gone Wild mantra that rules pop culture has sparked a rise in conservative, family values groups — convinced Armageddon is at hand — eager to turn the clock back to the ’50s. This can’t be a good thing.

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• It’s about money and a profit-driven industry that encourages young starlets to let their freak flags fly with wild abandon, then exploits the hell out of them. Is it any coincidence that Mariah Carey, Demi Lovato and Britney Spears — recently signed as judges on American Idol and The X Factor — all have highly publicized breakdowns under their belts?

• When feminist crusader Germaine Greer posited that “If a woman never . . . takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?” the idea of Internet sex tapes, barely clad pop stars and a Snookilicious line of cosmetics is probably not what she had in mind.

What’s needed, in this polarizing debate over the undignified nature of female celebrity, is a moderator, a smart, savvy, streetwise oracle who has been there, done that and lived to tell the tale.

What’s needed is Tina Fey, who in her pull-no-punches memoir, Bossypants, straddles the thin line between hectoring and hypocrisy, embracing dignity and self-respect (and a wicked sense of humour) as the tools for survival.

“Amy Poehler was new to Saturday Night Live and we were all crowded into the 17th floor writers’ room,” recounts the show’s former head writer about her early experiences with sexism. “And she did something vulgar as a joke. I can’t remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and ‘unladylike.’”

Whatever it was, it prompted the show’s presumed star, Jimmy Fallon, to wheel around indignantly and command: “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.”

Poehler, she recalls, stopped what she was doing, squinted like Dirty Harry and told her nonplussed co-star, “I don’t (bleep)in’ care if you like it.”

I met Tina Fey a few times at the annual TV critics press tour in Los Angeles, promoting her then-fledgling series, 30 Rock.

She wasn’t like the other celebrities flogging their shows, responding robotically to queries from the jackal-like press with one eye on their watches.

She exuded a certain — I won’t say feistiness — unruffled determination as she stood on the back lawn of Pasadena’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, kicked off her heels and patiently answered inane questions from tabloid hacks about everything from the contents of her purse to the childhood scar on the left side of her face.

I admired her, not because of her intractability in the face of stupidity, but because she knew how to play the game to get what she wanted.

And it worked. Aaron Sorkin, whose ambitious drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premiered the same year and was considered a surefire hit, left that party early, convinced critics would salivate over this show just as we’d slobbered over The West Wing.

Guess what. They didn’t and it was cancelled after a single season.

Not so the critically acclaimed 30 Rock, still going strong six years later, despite low ratings, with its plucky creator celebrated as a modern-age Mary Tyler Moore.

I mention this because pop culture is always in avid pursuit of role models for young women, glamourous trailblazers to pin their hopes and dreams on.

But in its obsession with what’s hot — its trumpeting of style over substance — it has overlooked women like Fey, who have successfully challenged male orthodoxy and succeeded on their own terms, without the embarrassing nuisance of public meltdowns.

Fey’s book, a New York Times bestseller, is ingenious, because under the guise of a Nora Ephron-styled collection of humourous essays, it’s actually a manifesto for 21st-century feminism that should be required reading for any woman (or man, frankly) aspiring for a career in the public eye.

“You can’t do that,” she writes, recalling the snooty response from male decision-makers to a suggestion that male and female roles at Second City be evenly split. “There won’t be enough parts to go around . . . there won’t be enough for the girls.”

“The insulting implication,” writes Fey in her blunt, humorous style, “is that the women wouldn’t have any ideas. This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury.”

At 42, Fey may be older and less flamboyant than the busty opportunists who strip down for magazine covers and equate empowerment with wardrobe malfunctions and narcissistic awards show speeches, but she’s the one who will, in the end, change the paradigm for women in the entertainment industry.

Feminist Greer had it right about taking off your high heels (in Fey’s case, literally) and seeing how fast you can run.

What she neglected to point out is that without principles, guts and an ethical rudder, you’ll never win the race.

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